Submitted 12 hours ago by xkcdbot@lemmy.world [bot] to xkcd@lemmy.world
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/snake_in_the_box_problem.png
xkcd #3125: Snake-in-the-Box Problem
Title text:
Chemistry grad students have been spotted trying to lure campus squirrels into laundry hampers in the hope that it sparks inspiration.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: xkcd.com/3125/
What about goats in circular pens? A goat is tied to the fence of a circular pen. How long does the rope need to be so that the goat can reach exactly half of the pen’s area? What sounds like a high school math problem was eventually solved in 2020 via complex analysis.
Here’s the answer:
I feel like the answer should be much simpler than that equation salad.
The difficulty is that the goat is tied to the fence.
It would be a lot easier to put a pole in the center of the circle.
The length of the rope would then be 0.5 x sqr(2) x fence radius.
Equation salad? It’s elegant. Well, according to my father who was a math professor.
Deriving that monstrosity must be something out of a grad school horror novel.
What’s really neat about this problem is that the 3D example, a bird in a cage, was solved sooner and is much simpler
This should do it, or am I missing something?
The head would share an edge with the arse (supposing the arse is on the first bend from the tail).
Your snake has two heads.
Also, one of them shares an edge with the tail.
I'm just nodding along and hoping no one notices i don't know what's happening
Unless your snake is an ouroboros, I don’t think folks will count the head and tail as consecutive
The head and tail aren’t adjacent if you only look at my blue line and not the original. But my attempt fails due to the far left edge.
I guess a key thought experiment doesn’t qualify as a reason, and also we are supposed to conveniently forget about putting spherical cows in a vacuum just because.
My combinatorics professor used gnomes!
I’m still trying to fill that hotel with infinite monkeys
There really is an xkcd for everything.
This is not my wheelhouse, and presumably were what I am about to suggest be right a million other people would have already pointed it out (not on lemmy necessarily, just in general). But aren’t all of those sides equal so the snake effectively shrinks/grows as it moves around the hypercube.
To be honest I don’t even understand what the cartoon means by ‘two non-consecutive parts of its coils’.
Took me a while to follow that too! The three examples of fails at the top each show instances where there are non-consecutive parts of the snake on adjacent corners - it’s the lines highlighted in red.
Basically no two parts of the snake that aren’t directly joined to each other in the snake are allowed to be on corners which are only a line apart.
I think.
Any two edges that are not directly connected.
nialv7@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Randall forgot psychology, which has involved a ton of putting animals in boxes…
twice_hatch@midwest.social 4 hours ago
In computer science, you steal the box from the psych department and put children in it so you can sell them loot crates
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Also zoology